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Dear Riot: Can we talk about support secondary in ranked? I get my 'primary' role 23% of the time

Dreampod·11/8/2016, 9:21:46 PM·5 votes·1,299 views

Now that the season is over can we get some communication about what is going to be done to make the Support role in Ranked play worthwhile and appealing? I queue up as Main: Mid, Secondary: Support and over the last month I've only gotten my 'Primary' role 23% of the time. I like playing support occasionally and I'm reasonably good at it but I'm getting to the point, like many other players before me, that I'm considering only taking support as a secondary when I actually want to play a support match since it means that I very rarely get to play the role that I'm actually interested in. This trend of 'part time support' players opting out of choosing support as a role just makes it more likely that other part timers will get filled there instead creating a negative feedback loop that leads to non-committed support players to opting out in greater and greater numbers. Now that the option to block a 'least desired' position out (which we all know will be support for more than half the playerbase) the situation will get even worse since autofill can't even correct the situation a large portion of the time.

What is Riot going to do to make it worthwhile for part time support players to keep queuing up that role when we could increase the likelihood of getting our 'primary' role by over 50% by choosing a different popular role as a secondary? What is Riot going to do to make Support as appealing a role to a broad cross-section of its players as the other 4?

As well could you get a data person to help address some of the other support related topics that come up regularly in the support community. -Can we get data on what percentage of the time a 'Secondary' support player gets their first choice versus their second choice by MMR -Does the heightened reliance on teammates and consequential greater variance and uncertainty in support players ability to influence the match outcome result a statistical difference in where players who play support in their placement games are seeded? Specifically is their seeding, on average, lower than their final season results compared to other roles or is there greater variance in their seeded to final results or are they statistically identical to other roles? -Can we get a graph of what percentage of players choose Support as their Primary and as their Secondary role over the duration of the season? Specifically, can we see if the rate falls as the season progresses.

As a ten year player I still enjoy the game and I'm endlessly fascinated to see how it evolves but support continues to be a perennial problem and while changes have made playing support feel less like being in an abusive relationships it is still frustrating to see that Riot hasn't committed to making the same sorts of systematic changes to address Support pain points (gold income is better these days but the XP deficit is still significant) that every season seems to get for the Jungle and that mid has gotten with the mage and assassin updates.

Regards, -Dreampod

11 Comments

Azure Hamster11/8/2016, 9:28:52 PM4 votes

I feel like I want a slider for how intolerant the system is with regard to giving me my secondary. Sometimes, I don't really mind getting support, but others I really want to play ADC. When I want ADC, I pick bot/top, and then it gives me top and I'm stuck in a role I'm not great at.

I don't mind waiting longer for ADC those times I really want it, and I'd like to be able to tell the system that.

Caitlyn

cope moment11/9/2016, 1:39:15 AM1 votes

I've got an interesting little thought here. Riot said that for the first week or Flex Queue ranked, they'd give out bonus IP incentives. Since they seemingly don't have any problem with IP incentives, why can't supports get them too? Of course, this wouldn't help elos where people don't need IP anymore, but this would be a step towards alleviating the issue in lower elos.

bad arcade kitty11/9/2016, 1:42:16 AM1 votes

it's pretty much like that - let's suppose you want to have 1/3-1/4 of your games as support while you main mid you don't queue mid/supp, you queue mid/top (if you get top you bring your mid champion there) and sometimes you queue mid/support to play support if you feel like it

thank riot for the role queue

Tagdha12/29/2016, 6:05:21 PM1 votes

I would like to put support as a secondary choice, but I don't because I'm afraid I'll hardly ever get my first choice (jungle). My guess is there are a lot more people out there thinking the same thing. With a better weighting towards getting primary choice, we could see a lot more people who are happy to pick support as a secondary role to play, maybe 20% of games. Surely this would be better for everyone?